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Inviting Children Into the Fun: Providing Enough Activity Choices Outdoors

by Elizabeth Jones
November/December 1989
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Simon Nicholson's "theory of loose parts" says:

In any environment, both the degree of inventiveness and creativity, and the possibility of discovery, are directly proportional to the number and kinds of variables in it.

. . . most environments that do not work . . . do not do so because they do not meet the "loose parts" requirement. Instead, they are clean, static, and impossible to play around with. What has happened is that adults in the form of professional artists, architects, landscape architects, and planners have had all the fun playing with their own materials, concepts, and planning alternatives, and then builders have had all the fun building the environments out of real materials. And thus has all the fun and creativity been stolen; children and adults and the community have been grossly cheated . . . (Nicholson, 1974, p. 30)

Children, like adult designers and builders, need loose parts with which to design and build for themselves. In environments which offer the possibility of discovery and inventiveness, children's play sustains itself. In environments devoid of loose parts, children get in trouble. It isn't very difficult to change one environment to the other.

Loose Parts in Action

The ...

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